Why are some songs hits?

Why is the Mona Lisa one of the most famous paintings around?

How do things really go viral on the internet (and in real life)?

Hit Makers by Derek Thompson does it best to answer why and how things go viral. I’m going to spoil the book for you because the principles are actually quite simple:

1. We like familiar things (i.e. if we’ve seen the Mona Lisa a thousand times, we’re likely to like it better than a painting we’ve never seen before)
2. We like following the crowd
3. We like and yet are scared of new things (neophilic and neophobic)

What this means is that “hits” (hit songs, hit books, hit movies) tend to consist of things that are both familiar and new. Much of the book is spent going into the details of why and how it occurs. While I found the first part of the book to be the most enlightening and the second half a little bit repetitive, the whole book is worth reading because in the latter half of the book, Thompson goes into a discussion of the “viral” myth. Things don’t go viral in the way we expect, he argues, they are basically pushed by people with large audiences and that makes them seem popular. I’m not sure to what extent that is true, since something needs to be shareable before it’s picked up by someone with influence, but it does seem like most mainstream successes come about because an insanely famous person talked about it.

Honestly, this was an interesting book. I wasn’t sure what I was getting when I picked it up, but I learnt quite a bit from it on how ideas spread. I wish it also talked about the people who helped spread the hits (i.e. how did they get famous enough to be able to ‘create’ hits) but I also remember that Malcolm Gladwell has written a bit about this so maybe I should be looking that up instead.